Wednesday, 22 April 2015

PAY SLIPS OF THE PRAYING MANTIS

Continuing on the theme of violence....

My Dad worked in the steel industry all his life - at Britannia, Cargo Fleet, Port Clarence and for Cleveland Bridge in Darlington, Dubai, Iraq, Saudi Arabia.

My Dad said: “I met one of the old platers in Darlo. We were
talking about Duffy. He was a real rough bugger, worked in the stockyard. Fight
anyone. The only bloke he wouldn’t take on was an erector, Davy Walker –
ex-paratrooper, hard as nails, came out of South Bank. I said to this Duffy, “If you're so tough how come you’ve never had a go at Walker”. He said, “I’m
waiting till he’s past it… And he’s almost past it now.”

"This Duffy, he’d have six,
seven pints and his fingers would start curling and flexing, curling and flexing. Blokes saw him doing that, the
pub cleared out. The old plater said, “His wife was the only one who could
control him. When she was with him everyone could relax. After she died he went
berserk.”

My Dad said, "It's a good job he was in his seventies by then, or somebody would really’ve
got hurt”.

He says: "It's lucky the stockyard never got to play in that bloody inter-departmental football league."The inter-departmental football league at Cleveland Bridge only lasted one match. It was the brainchild of a new personnel manager who'd arrived from the south. He had a lot of clever ideas about bonding and team building between the different skill bases in the works. He said, 'If you defence doesn't know who your attack is, then how can you expect to win the game?'The first and only match in the inter-departmental football league was between the welding bays and accounts.My Dad said: "It was abandoned midway through the second half when the accounts team was reduced to six men by injuries. Three of them were hospitalised. This big gangly welder that everybody called the Praying Mantis did most of the damage. The Praying Mantis was a bloke who looked like he had twelve elbows, and he wasn't particular about where he stuck them.""I went down to the welding bays next day. I saw one of the foremen. I said, 'What was all that about yesterday then?" He said, 'I don't rightly know. But I tell you what, I bet it's the last time the fuck up our overtime payments."That was over twenty years ago, but my Dad still chuckles every time he thinks of it.

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(Thanks to Kevin Donnelly for the photo)

About the Blogger

Harry Pearson is the author of The Far Corner and nine other works of non-fiction, including Slipless in Settle - winner of the 2011 MCC/Cricket Society Prize. From 1997 through to 2012 he wrote over 700 columns for the Guardian sports section. He has worked for When Saturday Comes since 1988.

About This Blog

When The Far Corner came out a well known football writer whose work I like and respect told me he been unable to finish it. Too much non-League. Too many howls of outrage in the lumpy rain of steeltown winters. Not enough rapture. ‘I’m only interested in the great stars, the great occasions,’ he said, ‘To me football is like opera.’

I don’t care much for opera. And so I have carried on much as I did before: writing about unsung people in rough places where the PA plays 'Sex on the Beach' in the coal-scented February fog and men with ill-advised hair bellow, 'Christ on a bike, this is the drizzling shits.'I could justify this with grandiosity. I could say Dickens and Balzac, Orwell and Zola were more interested in the lower divisions of society than its elite. I could tell you that the sportswriters I most admire are almost all Americans whose primary subject is boxing. AJ Liebling, WC Heinz, Thomas Hauser, Phil Berger and the rest inhabit a world where hucksters, gangsters, the desperate, the doomed and the mad hang out in stinking gyms and amidst the rattle of slot machines, and trainers such as Roger Mayweather say things like, "You don't need no strategy to fight Arturo Gatti. Close your eyes, throw your hands and you'll hit him in the fucking face."

But that is to be wise after the event. Norman Mailer said every writer writes what he can. It is not a choice. We play the cards we're dealt.

A few years ago I stood in a social club kitchen near Ashington listening to an old bloke named Bill talk about a time in the early 1950s when, on a windswept field at East Hirst, beneath anthracite sky, he’d watched a skinny blond teenager ‘float over that mud like a little angel’, glowing at the memory of Bobby Charlton.

Opera is pantomime for histrionic show offs, but this? This is true romance.

The First 30 Years features some new writing and lots of older pieces going back to the late-1980s. This work first appeared in When Saturday Comes, The Guardian, various other newspapers, fanzines and a number of those glossy men's lifestyle magazines that have women in bras on the cover. It is my intention over the next year or so to collect it all here, if for no other reason than to prove to my family that I did do some work every once in a while.

In keeping with the original rhythms of the game I'll post a new piece every Saturday (kick-off times may vary)

The best images here have been provided by a trio of the great photographers I've been lucky enough to work with over the years. I'm very grateful to Tim Hetherington, Colin McPherson, and Peter Robinson for letting me use their work - all of which is copyright of those individuals and cannot be reproduced without their permission.